Online enrollment at universities on the rise

You can be in a foxhole in the middle of Iraq taking a physiology test or at home in bed wearing pajamas while chatting with a professor.

That explains the sound of gunfire retired professor Chuck Robinson heard during an online class he taught at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.

While teaching students in a war zone isn’t the norm, it’s an example of how online instruction is available to students no matter where they are or the time of day.

“It doesn’t make sense that someone who lives 10 miles from the Canadian border needs to come to Alabama to hear me lecture,” said Robinson’s wife, Cheryl Robinson, a clinical associate professor in USA’s College of Nursing.

Area professors say online instruction, especially for non-traditional students who can’t always go to a brick and mortar school, is steadily increasing.

Nationally, online enrollment rose by almost one million students in the fall of 2009, according to the 2010 Sloan Survey of Online Learning. The survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities nationwide found that approximately 5.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2009.

The University of South Alabama’s online enrollment increased by 55 percent to 4,832 students this fall over last year, according to David Johnson, USA’s senior vice president of academic affairs.

Spring Hill College’s online enrollment increased by 45 percent from the 2009-10 school year to the 2010-11 academic year, said school spokesman John Kerr.

Like most four-year schools, USA, Spring Hill College and the University of Mobile offer blended courses, which combine online and classroom instruction, and courses totally online.

There are also non-traditional schools, such as Columbia Southern University in Foley.

There are no classrooms in the 67,000-square-foot, three-story building at Columbia Southern. Instruction is all done online; professors teach from their offices.

Columbia Southern has seen a 25 percent annual increase each of the last few years, according to Beau Vignes, the school’s director of marketing.

Online instruction, said Johnson, has helped USA students improve grades, something that has also occurred nationally.

Students taking all or part of their classes online “performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction,” according to a U.S. Department of Education study in 2009.

Area professors see positives and negatives for teachers and students.

“It amazed me to see how well I could get to know the students online,” said Anne Lowery, associate vice president for academic affairs at the University of Mobile.

Lowery, who was responsible for evaluating students’ opinions of online studies, said students are “overwhelmingly in favor” of online courses. Students like the flexibility, said Lowery, adding, “They can fit it into their schedules.”

Getting quicker feedback online from teachers is another plus for students, she said.

Some students are more apt to participate in a class discussion online than in a nursing class with 100 other students at USA, said Cheryl Robinson.

But a negative, she said, is that online instruction “may contribute to procrastination” because it requires “self-directed learning.”

She learned something from teaching her first online class.

“There was an abundance of information online,” she said, adding, “I overloaded the class.”

She’s since learned how to limit it to “the most important thing I want the students to get.”